Introduction For commercial broiler production, about 20,000 – 30,000 birds are raised in each confined house, which has caused growing public concerns on animal welfare. Currently, daily evaluation of broiler wellbeing and growth is conducted manually, which is labor intensive and subjective to human errors. Therefore, there is a need for an automatic tool to […]
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Robotics and Visual Sensemaking in Agriculture: Perspectives and Future Directions
Dr. Joshua Peschel, Associate Professor of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering at Iowa State University
Friday, October 27
Room 319, Building 1013 (Old Poultry Science Building – 110 Cedar Street)
12:00 pm
About the Speaker:
Dr. Joshua Peschel is an Associate Professor of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering at Iowa State University; he also holds courtesy appointments in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering. Dr. Peschel conducts research in cyber-agricultural systems where he and his students create new technologies, data sets, and computational models for automated visual sensing and sensemaking. His expertise includes cyber-agricultural systems, visual data sensing and analytics, and robot-assisted measurement. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Defense and Energy, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and several commodity groups and private industry partners.
Losses during peanut harvest are common and can be caused by improper setup, operation and/or performance of the harvest equipment. Some losses can also be attributed to the field and crop conditions at harvest. Excessive losses can significantly reduce peanut yields and profits if not managed or reduced during harvest. While harvest losses cannot be […]
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The Institute for Integrative Precision Agriculture (IIPA) held its Fall Networking event “An IPA with IIPA” on Thursday, September 21.
Seventeen faculty members attended, along with two staff members. The event focused on welcoming the Institute’s newest members, while bidding a fond farewell to co-interim director, Jaime Camelio, and recognizing all of his hard work on the IIPA engineering side.
Additionally, IIPA co-director Harald Scherm, introduced the Institute’s newest interim co-director for Engineering, Ramaraja Ramasamy.
New Member Faculty:
The IIPA is now soliciting applications for the FY2024 Integrative Precision Agriculture Pre-Seed Grant Program. The IIPA Pre-Seed Program provides early-stage developmental funding ($5,000/team) to facilitate the formation of faculty teams and collaboration around critical areas of research expertise or emerging research topics in the broad area of integrative precision agriculture (IPA). The goal of the pre-seed funding is to stimulate the formation of new interdisciplinary research teams that position UGA faculty to be competitive for attracting resources for collaborative research, including internal UGA seed grants and ultimately, external grant support.
The IIPA Pre-Seed Program provides early-stage developmental funding ($5,000/team) to facilitate the formation of faculty teams and collaboration around critical areas of research expertise or emerging research topics in the broad area of integrative precision agriculture (IPA). The goal of the pre-seed funding is to stimulate the formation of new interdisciplinary research teams that position UGA faculty to be competitive for attracting resources for collaborative research, including internal UGA seed grants and ultimately, external grant support. The Program is made possible through funding from the Office of Research, in partnership with the Office of the Provost, the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and the College of Engineering.
This funding level is insufficient to support research per se, however it may be used for team-building activities such as networking meals, part-time student support, group website development, and travel to meet with potential external collaborators or funding agencies. Faculty may not use this funding to work on a project that is already supported by university funds, directly or indirectly through a center/institute/program.
To be eligible for the program, teams require a minimum of six members across at least three different disciplines/academic units. Each team should be led by a tenure-track or tenured faculty member who is also a member of IIPA. It is strongly encouraged that teams include both members and non-members of the IIPA. Teaching, research and service faculty who are not tenure-track or tenured and not members of the IIPA may participate as team members. Faculty members may join multiple teams but can only be the team leader of one team. Once a research team’s application is approved, a lump sum of $5,000 will be transferred to the team leader for management. These funds are required to be expended within 12 months.
Applications for pre-seed funding require a name for the team, team lead and member names and their units, a brief description of its intended research focus and its relation to IPA, a visual representation or image of the research, and a list of team members. This information will be used to represent the team projects on the IIPA website.
The application window for the FY2024 program will open on 14 August 2023 and will close 13 September 2023 at 11:59 PM or when available funds are allocated. To apply, team leads need to complete and submit their team’s IIPA Pre-Seed application through InfoReady at https://uga.infoready4.com/#competitionDetail/1913517 using the “Apply” button.
Over the next year, the Institute for Integrative Precision Agriculture (IIPA) will issue two separate calls for proposals, a Pre-Seed Program that provides early-stage developmental funding to support team-building (this program) and a Seed Grant Program that funds preliminary research or infrastructure-building (to be announced later this year).
With increased availability and interest in spray drones recently, we are starting to see more people getting into the spray drone application business as well as growers who are interested to learn more about the technology and its application capabilities. The wet weather during months of May and June across much of the southeastern US […]
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Liquid applicators are commonly used to apply different fertilizer solutions and similar to the sprayers, they need to be calibrated properly to apply the desired application rate in gallons per acre (GPA). While the calibration process for liquid fertilizer applicators is similar to the sprayers, the actual rate for the fertilizer can vary greatly from […]
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